Landen Conway and Roy Forestano, two outstanding graduate students in UF Physics, have recently been awarded the esteemed Steigleman Family Fellowship. Their notable achievements in the field of theoretical astrophysics are commendable as they pursue their research endeavors.
Landen Conway (advisor: Cliff Will) Landen is a third-year graduate student working with Professor Cliff Will on triple-system dynamics. Landen discovered a whole hierarchy of second-order contributions as well as a third-order effect that must be included in the solution. Landen has mastered the necessary lore of orbital dynamics and of Newtonian and post-Newtonian gravity, along with advanced use of software such as Mathematica, which is essential for carrying out highly complex analytical calculations. Landen arrived at UF during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a consequence, has not been able to attend a conference in person to present his work. (He did give a recorded talk at the 2022 APS April meeting). The Steigleman Fellowship will allow him to attend an American Astronomical Society (AAS) or American Physical Society (APS) meeting during the next academic year. Additional research opportunities include travel to Paris to work with Professor Will and interact with colleagues at the Institute of Astrophysics and at the Observatory of Paris, which houses the world’s leading N-body ephemeris group.
Roy Forestano (advisor: Katia Matcheva) Roy is finishing his second year in our graduate physics program and has completed all required physics core courses with “flying colors.” He has been working with Professor Katia Matcheva on the “Application of Novel Machine Learning Techniques for Characterization of Extrasolar System Planets.” Roy has co-authored four publications on a broad range of topics, including extrasolar system planets, abstract Lie algebras, and symmetry searches with the help of Deep Learning techniques. Last summer, Roy and his research team embarked on a data challenge that was organized by the science team of the Ariel space mission in preparation for future data analysis. The competition was part of the NeurIPS 2022 conference. With more than 200 participating international teams, Roy’s group won the first place prize. Roy played a central role in the team and now he is improving on the retrieval model by investigating a variety of numerical architectures by optimizing the sampling and training algorithms.
Undergraduate Student Awards
Thirteen undergraduate students were recognized with research awards and scholarships at the 2023 Physics Undergraduate Poster Party, held in April 2023.
Alen Zacharia was named the winner of the 2023 David R. Griggs Award in Physics. Alen is a fourth-year physics major, minoring in mathematics and computer science, and working with Prof. Juan Guan. He presented a poster titled “Data Driven Model Discovery with Parameterized Basis Terms.” The award was established by Dr. David R. Griggs, who is a UF Physics alumnus.
Robert Heyck and Tarik Campbell were recognized with the Chris B. Schaffer Undergraduate Research Scholarship for summer 2023. Robert is a physics major working with Prof. BingKan Xue. He spent the summer on a project titled, “Reconstructing Spectral Reflectance from Multi-illuminant Optimization.” Tarik worked with Prof. Mark Meisel on a project titled “Magnetism in 2D van der Waals Systems”. The scholarship was created by Dr. Chris Schaffer, who was an undergraduate physics major at the University of Florida, where he won the LeRoy Apker Award of the American Physical Society.
Three students won the Ruth & Earl Sawyer Award for their excellent research posters: Warren Boschen, Nick Kapsos, and Caeli Benyacko, each received a cash prize and certificate. The award was established in the Physics Department in 1971 by Earl M. and Ruth B. Sawyer, who were both UF alumni. In addition, the department recognized two winners of the CLAS Scholars Program and five winners of the UF Undergraduate Scholars Program. Nick Kapsos and Monique Kubovsky won CLAS scholarships, and the UF-USP winners were Rhett Hoke, Marcus Mynatt, Caeli Benyacko, Oscar Barrera, and Sreeram Vasudevan.
Two undergraduate students were awarded the 2023–2024 William Oegerle Scholarship in Physics and Astronomy. Dana Yaptangco is an astronomy major and works with Prof. Sarah Ballard in Astronomy. Nhat Huy Tran is a physics major and works with Prof. Chunjing Jia in Physics.
Huy’s project with Prof. Jia will combine X-ray diffraction data with machine learning techniques to predict crystal structures for double perovskite materials. Perovskites are novel materials with many potential applications in photovoltaics and optical devices. Double perovskites are a special class with potential value for spintronics and electronic devices. Huy and Prof. Jia will train a neural network to take experimental X-ray diffraction data for perovskites and generate a 2D crystal graph of the material structure, leading to a real crystal structure. They hope that their approach can outperform traditional methods for obtaining crystal structure from X-ray data.
The Oegerle scholarships were created by UF alumnus Dr. William Oegerle, who graduated from UF in 1972 with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and received his Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Oegerle was a Director with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and, in 2016, was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the top honor NASA can bestow on a civilian.
